This is the kind of place where you can find the original wall panels from Coco Chanel’s living room, rescued from a demolished Parisian mansion she once lived in. Down a corridor, the 200 year-old components of an entire room designed for Napoleon are casually stockpiled like pieces of an 18th century puzzle waiting to…

Woody Allen pulls off one of Groucho Marx’s best lines in Annie Hall — you know, the one that goes, “I wouldn’t want belong to any sort of club that would have me as a member”. He’s kidding, of course, but the line perfectly reflects that charming New York brand of pessimism, and because it…

Where’s your husband Annie? Where’s number two and three? Are they sleeping neath the palms beside the Caribbean Sea? At night I hear you ridin’ and I hear your lovers call And still can feel your presence round the great house at Rose Hall… –Johnny Cash Something unsettling sleeps in the walls of Jamaica’s seductive Rose…

They’re kind of Brooklyn’s Romeo and Juliet. He was made of slot car stock, and she was, well, not. At least, that’s what she’ll tell you — but it’s clear that Dolores, who’s one-half of the legendary couple behind Buzz-a-Rama, is a slot car queen. “Oh this whole thing?” she jokes, a boot propped up…

Her words rang out for 5,000 to hear, and in 16 languages, on a winter’s day in 1968. It was the inauguration of Auroville, the futuristic utopia in India led by guru Mirra Alfassa, who declared her mission to make “a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace…

It doesn’t get much better than this, especially for a morning commute: space-age chandeliers, marble statues, ‘golden’ ornaments, and a floor so clean you lick your lunch clean off it. Well, it’s all a part of the Moscow Metro, which has been shuttling Russians to-and-fro in opulent style since 1935. The stops were designed to…

I‘m a gastronomic moron when it comes to the classic French brasserie. I really have no idea if the food is any good because I’m too busy side-eyeing the floor tiles, the typefaces, ogling at the glass ceiling and imagining the entire scene exactly as it was 50 or 100 years ago. Walk into any of…

You know that great aunt who arrives early, and overdressed, to parties? The one who smells like powdered Shalimar, and guards every single family secret under layers of costume jewellery with her life? That’s Grand Prospect Hall personified. The four-story banquet hall is the last outpost of Victorian grandeur in New York, and for nearly…

Paige Stevenson doesn’t quite live in the same world as the rest of us. “People talk a lot about what it means to make art,” she says on the foggy Sunday morning when we visit her home, while biscuits warm in the oven, “I just think, why not live it? People get so caught up…

There was once a secret language used by women for centuries to communicate unspoken sentiments across the room. It was the code of duchesses and ladies-in-waiting; women who made bi-weekly trips to the opera armed with an exquisite accessory that with a simple flick of her wrist, could declare her true feelings for a gentleman sat across…